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First architects

From
Jonathan Schmidt

Your review of The Microprocessor&colon; A Biography needs to mention the origin of the architecture of the processors in PCs (Review, 4 November and Letters, 2 December). Three of us created it in 1969 at Datapoint, Harry Pyle and Victor Poor designing the architecture and I doing the simulator.

One of the first programs written for it was Pyle’s morse code decoder and teletype emulator for our three respective hamshacks. A contract was let to both TI and Intel to make the Datapoint 2200’s processor into one or two chips. The first desktop PC (Keyboard, CRT, Processor, Mass storage, I/O channel, Serial port, etc) to …